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dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen
turned also and waited for a few moments till his compan-
ion’s ill-humour had had its vent.
—This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way
out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful
to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find
in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the
stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These rela-
tions of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to
me through another, must be therefore the necessary quali-
ties of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint
Thomas for another pennyworth of wisdom.
Lynch laughed.
—It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him
time after time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in
your sleeve?
—MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic
theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic phi-
losophy extends, Aquinas will carry me all along the line.
When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception,
artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new
terminology and a new personal experience.
—Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his
intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell
me about the new personal experience and new terminol-
ogy some other day. Hurry up and finish the first part.
—Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas
would understand me better than you. He was a poet him-
self. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with

260 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man